IRT-Institute of Automatic Control

Head of the Institute

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dirk Abel

Field of Study

all (control engineering is a compulsory subject for all fields of study)

Main Focus

The Institute of Automatic Control belongs to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the RWTH Aachen University and operates research in the fields of modeling and control of complex systems. The methodological focuses are model predictive control, robust control and networked control systems.

Research Focus

The Institute is apart from its methodological focuses mainly characterized by its application-oriented research. Corresponding to this, it is structured in the groups Automotive, Industry, Combustion, Energy, Galileo und Medical.

The Automotive group is engaged in the development of innovative control concepts for drive train components as well as full vehicles. Main areas of research comprise control of modern combustion engines, the development of intelligent energy management strategies for hybrid electric vehicles and the design of future driver assistance systems.

The research focus of the Industry group is concentrated on innovative power plant concepts, energy optimized operation of process plants as well as controller design for production technologies. The modelling and simulation of the system dynamics and the design of suitable control strategies for these systems are the core working field of the group.

The Combustion group is working with advanced model predictive control methods to facilitate innovative combustion processes and address their varying demands. The research focuses on the economical and ecological energy provision for mobile applications such as combustion engines in cars and for stationary applications such as gas turbines or generators.

The research focuses of the Energy group are the modeling and control of energy systems. Especially the efficient usage of renewable energy power plants is part of their investigations.

The Galileo group is developing the basis for autonomously driving systems using satellite navigation. Apart from GPS, the European navigation system Galileo is explicitly used as well. The overall focus lays on an improvement of the localisation accuracy by sensor fusion and the integration of external data, which requires reliable and highly available data sources. Furthermore, the evaluation and integrity of data plays a key role for autonomous applications in safety-critical fields.

The Medical group is working on automation systems for the rehabilitation and radiotherapy of patients, where the description and activation of their motions is of main interest. The group also investigates models to describe the cardiovascular system and effective control loops within the human body.